Thanks for making this thread—I was waiting for something like this! I’m not sure if the advice I’m looking for is on career planning in the usual sense, but your many reassurances have convinced me to give it a go anyway :)
My story begins a few months ago, when I realized I had never actually read 80,000 Hours’ top recommended career paths, and a few of them were things I didn’t know about that would be good fits for me. Doh! That discovery sent me into career crisis spiral of doom.
The good news is that I have high-impact career paths available to me—I’m a computer science student, this is well-trodden ground—in AI safety research and earning to give as a software engineer.
I know what I need to do. The bad news is I’m intensely doubting my ability to do it.
When I think about the researchers and engineers I know who’ve succeeded a step above where I am, I’m doubtful that I can measure up to their intelligence; but I’m even more concerned that they seem to be more interested and motivated than I am. I feel viscerally excited about the goals of EA, but I can’t often transfer that into excitement for writing code or reading a textbook. And in the absence of excitement, I’m not sure I have the focus or perseverance that I’d need to either do meaningful research or succeed at the highest impact paths in earning to give.
Part of me thinks: I am not yet a god. Am I creating needless guilt for myself? Am I making a futile effort to force myself into doing something I will never care much about and so will never be good at? I do seem to be below-average at forcing myself to do things I don’t want to do. And, aside from its other good effects, being interested in your work sure is good for productivity—maybe I should just focus on trying to find work I can be more excited about?
Those are the thoughts that make it very difficult for me to take the concrete career steps that are staring me in the face.
Another part of me says: The reality of work is that it’s not something you do because it’s exciting, it’s something you do because it’s useful—surely everyone feels that way. And what better option do I have? The thing I am naturally excited to work on is usually art, and the paths I see to doing good in art are pretty shaky.
Every resource I’ve looked at—including the 80,000 Hours worksheet, on which I just yesterday threw in the towel—seems to be aimed at helping me identify high-impact career paths. I guess I’m looking for some sort of reassurance or accountability, and I feel like I’m stumbling in the dark. I was sad to see that EA Oxford’s career advising is temporarily closed, my own school’s is not yet open, and 80k’s career advising is quite selective and not aimed at students.
If anyone feels like they have some advice to share, or maybe is in a similar situation, I’d love to hear from you! Would be happy to share more details by PM.
For what it’s worth, I was barely able to do CS homework, but worked pretty successfully as a programmer for about a decade and still occasionally code for fun. Some (all?) universities have a remarkable ability to make the most interesting subjects monotonous, and I would be cautious in going from “I don’t want to read a CS textbook” to “CS is not for me”. (If you are directly reading AI safety research, and you have enough of the background to understand it yet still are bored by it, that seems like a stronger signal to me.)
Thanks! I hadn’t read that post, and it’s definitely related to what I’m thinking about.
I don’t have any real experience with AI research, so I won’t claim to know how interesting I would find that in particular. The thing that concerns me most is that as a kid I really enjoyed programming—and reading programming books—in a way I don’t anymore, even when I do it for fun.
I have a tough time getting immersed in it now. It’s hard to tell whether that’s from my interests shifting elsewhere, or me accumulating more responsibilities/worries/stressors, or if it’s just novelty wearing off.
Thanks for commenting! That seems like an interesting question/predicament, and well-worth reaching out for people’s advice about.
I’ll send you a PM to see if I’d have more useful things to say if given more context. But first I’ll share a few very tentative, low-effort-from-methoughts/links that might be useful in situations somewhat similar to this one. And I’ll do so publicly in case that’s helpful for other people too. But these are not confident recommendations, since I haven’t been in precisely that situation and don’t know your full context. (Also, no need to respond here unless you want to; you can also respond via PM.)
And hopefully some other people can jump in with advice as well, here or in PMs.
With those caveats in mind...
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It sounds to me like maybe there are two angles from which this situation could be tackled:
(How) Can you increase your ability/tendency to be motivated about and focused on the things you think it might in theory be highest impact for you to do?
With the key issue being motivation and focus on a very practical level and relatively short time-scales, rather than something like higher-level goals.
What career paths should you pursue, given your hypotheses about what you’ll be motivated about and focused on?
I’m not sure how much reading posts would help by itself, but I’d guess it’d help with similar things for some people, and it could be a quite low-effort thing to try
I think this has relevant stuff, though I haven’t read it since early 2019 so I can’t remember for sure
I’d normally suggest the Replacing Guilt blog post series as an option as well (mainly because some people I know found it useful, rather than because of my own views on it). But it sounds like you’ve read that already.
I think each of these things would be essentially just starting points, rather than full solutions in themselves; I’m pointing you to them in hopes that one of them can point you to further relevant and useful things.
---
On Q2, some thoughts that come to mind are:
“being interested in your work sure is good for productivity” seems very true to me
Relatedly, I’d be cautious with thoughts like “The reality of work is that it’s not something you do because it’s exciting, it’s something you do because it’s useful—surely everyone feels that way.”
I’d guess that (i) almost everyone does feel that way sometimes, but (ii) probably a lot of the particularly productive people will fairly often not feel like they’re “working” or having to “push themselves” when doing their job.
As such, I think it’s probably indeed wise to really think about what work you can be excited about, on a day to day level, a lot of the time (though it won’t be all of the time).
But I don’t think that that by itself strongly pushes in favour of doing what you currently expect you’d be most excited about, or strongly pushes against doing the two paths you currently expect you wouldn’t be excited about on a day-to-day-level. This is for three reasons:
Have you actually tried out what day to day life would be like in the two career paths you mention? It is plausible you actually would like that, even if you don’t currently imagine you would, or even if you don’t like the day to day life of the sort of preliminary or training activities (like relevant college courses)?
Maybe there are relatively low-effort ways to test out how much you’d like doing the tasks involved in actually having those jobs?
Maybe there are other career paths that would be highly impactful and that you would become excited about on a day to day level, but that you haven’t considered much or haven’t tried out?
Maybe there’d be some way you could make one of the highly impactful paths more motivating to you than it’d be by default?
E.g., maybe there’s a way to tweak the exact nature of the role, or combine it with some side activity, such that it’s more appealing?
E.g., maybe if you get better at a particular skill, that part of the role will suddenly flow easily, and that’ll make the day-to-day less aversive?
(Again, I should know that I have very little context on you or your situation, so these are just quick thoughts.)
(But all that said, for all I know, it definitely is possible that the best career path for you—from both a personal and impact perspective—would be a path that’s quite related to the things you currently expect to be most motivated by.)
Thanks, Michael! It’s taken me a while to respond to this because I’m still going through all the links you sent. I’m glad to have so many reading directions to explore. One thing that’s stood out to me so far is the section on mental health in 80K’s “All the evidence-based advice we found on how to be more successful in any job,” which motivated me to rethink how much time and energy I should invest in that area.
As I mentioned in another comment, I think I have a good idea of the day-to-day of software engineering. Research not so much, and I do hope to get some experience in that direction soon. I’ll also be thinking about your other suggestions about exploring other career paths and adapting the paths I’m on.
Thanks for making this thread—I was waiting for something like this! I’m not sure if the advice I’m looking for is on career planning in the usual sense, but your many reassurances have convinced me to give it a go anyway :)
My story begins a few months ago, when I realized I had never actually read 80,000 Hours’ top recommended career paths, and a few of them were things I didn’t know about that would be good fits for me. Doh! That discovery sent me into career crisis spiral of doom.
The good news is that I have high-impact career paths available to me—I’m a computer science student, this is well-trodden ground—in AI safety research and earning to give as a software engineer.
I know what I need to do. The bad news is I’m intensely doubting my ability to do it.
When I think about the researchers and engineers I know who’ve succeeded a step above where I am, I’m doubtful that I can measure up to their intelligence; but I’m even more concerned that they seem to be more interested and motivated than I am. I feel viscerally excited about the goals of EA, but I can’t often transfer that into excitement for writing code or reading a textbook. And in the absence of excitement, I’m not sure I have the focus or perseverance that I’d need to either do meaningful research or succeed at the highest impact paths in earning to give.
Part of me thinks: I am not yet a god. Am I creating needless guilt for myself? Am I making a futile effort to force myself into doing something I will never care much about and so will never be good at? I do seem to be below-average at forcing myself to do things I don’t want to do. And, aside from its other good effects, being interested in your work sure is good for productivity—maybe I should just focus on trying to find work I can be more excited about?
Those are the thoughts that make it very difficult for me to take the concrete career steps that are staring me in the face.
Another part of me says: The reality of work is that it’s not something you do because it’s exciting, it’s something you do because it’s useful—surely everyone feels that way. And what better option do I have? The thing I am naturally excited to work on is usually art, and the paths I see to doing good in art are pretty shaky.
Every resource I’ve looked at—including the 80,000 Hours worksheet, on which I just yesterday threw in the towel—seems to be aimed at helping me identify high-impact career paths. I guess I’m looking for some sort of reassurance or accountability, and I feel like I’m stumbling in the dark. I was sad to see that EA Oxford’s career advising is temporarily closed, my own school’s is not yet open, and 80k’s career advising is quite selective and not aimed at students.
If anyone feels like they have some advice to share, or maybe is in a similar situation, I’d love to hear from you! Would be happy to share more details by PM.
You might be interested in the lottery of fascinations.
For what it’s worth, I was barely able to do CS homework, but worked pretty successfully as a programmer for about a decade and still occasionally code for fun. Some (all?) universities have a remarkable ability to make the most interesting subjects monotonous, and I would be cautious in going from “I don’t want to read a CS textbook” to “CS is not for me”. (If you are directly reading AI safety research, and you have enough of the background to understand it yet still are bored by it, that seems like a stronger signal to me.)
Thanks! I hadn’t read that post, and it’s definitely related to what I’m thinking about.
I don’t have any real experience with AI research, so I won’t claim to know how interesting I would find that in particular. The thing that concerns me most is that as a kid I really enjoyed programming—and reading programming books—in a way I don’t anymore, even when I do it for fun.
I have a tough time getting immersed in it now. It’s hard to tell whether that’s from my interests shifting elsewhere, or me accumulating more responsibilities/worries/stressors, or if it’s just novelty wearing off.
Thanks for commenting! That seems like an interesting question/predicament, and well-worth reaching out for people’s advice about.
I’ll send you a PM to see if I’d have more useful things to say if given more context. But first I’ll share a few very tentative, low-effort-from-me thoughts/links that might be useful in situations somewhat similar to this one. And I’ll do so publicly in case that’s helpful for other people too. But these are not confident recommendations, since I haven’t been in precisely that situation and don’t know your full context. (Also, no need to respond here unless you want to; you can also respond via PM.)
And hopefully some other people can jump in with advice as well, here or in PMs.
With those caveats in mind...
---
It sounds to me like maybe there are two angles from which this situation could be tackled:
(How) Can you increase your ability/tendency to be motivated about and focused on the things you think it might in theory be highest impact for you to do?
With the key issue being motivation and focus on a very practical level and relatively short time-scales, rather than something like higher-level goals.
What career paths should you pursue, given your hypotheses about what you’ll be motivated about and focused on?
---
On Q1, some things that come to mind are:
You could schedule a free call with Lynette Bye, who runs EA Coaching
I haven’t used this service myself, nor interacted with Lynette much, but it looks like various EAs have found her services valuable.
My impression is that she especially focuses on productivity, but sees things like motivation and focus as part of / related to that.
You could read relevant-seeming posts from Lynette
I’m not sure how much reading posts would help by itself, but I’d guess it’d help with similar things for some people, and it could be a quite low-effort thing to try
You could read LessWrong posts on akrasia
I’m not sure this is exactly the right concept for what you’re talking about, but it seems somewhat related
You could read 80k’s All the evidence-based advice we found on how to be more successful in any job
I think this has relevant stuff, though I haven’t read it since early 2019 so I can’t remember for sure
I’d normally suggest the Replacing Guilt blog post series as an option as well (mainly because some people I know found it useful, rather than because of my own views on it). But it sounds like you’ve read that already.
I think each of these things would be essentially just starting points, rather than full solutions in themselves; I’m pointing you to them in hopes that one of them can point you to further relevant and useful things.
---
On Q2, some thoughts that come to mind are:
“being interested in your work sure is good for productivity” seems very true to me
Relatedly, I’d be cautious with thoughts like “The reality of work is that it’s not something you do because it’s exciting, it’s something you do because it’s useful—surely everyone feels that way.”
I’d guess that (i) almost everyone does feel that way sometimes, but (ii) probably a lot of the particularly productive people will fairly often not feel like they’re “working” or having to “push themselves” when doing their job.
As such, I think it’s probably indeed wise to really think about what work you can be excited about, on a day to day level, a lot of the time (though it won’t be all of the time).
But I don’t think that that by itself strongly pushes in favour of doing what you currently expect you’d be most excited about, or strongly pushes against doing the two paths you currently expect you wouldn’t be excited about on a day-to-day-level. This is for three reasons:
Have you actually tried out what day to day life would be like in the two career paths you mention? It is plausible you actually would like that, even if you don’t currently imagine you would, or even if you don’t like the day to day life of the sort of preliminary or training activities (like relevant college courses)?
Maybe there are relatively low-effort ways to test out how much you’d like doing the tasks involved in actually having those jobs?
Maybe there are other career paths that would be highly impactful and that you would become excited about on a day to day level, but that you haven’t considered much or haven’t tried out?
Maybe there’d be some way you could make one of the highly impactful paths more motivating to you than it’d be by default?
E.g., maybe there’s a way to tweak the exact nature of the role, or combine it with some side activity, such that it’s more appealing?
E.g., maybe if you get better at a particular skill, that part of the role will suddenly flow easily, and that’ll make the day-to-day less aversive?
(Again, I should know that I have very little context on you or your situation, so these are just quick thoughts.)
(But all that said, for all I know, it definitely is possible that the best career path for you—from both a personal and impact perspective—would be a path that’s quite related to the things you currently expect to be most motivated by.)
(My thinking here is informed by 80k’s 2014/2017 article on personal fit.)
Thanks, Michael! It’s taken me a while to respond to this because I’m still going through all the links you sent. I’m glad to have so many reading directions to explore. One thing that’s stood out to me so far is the section on mental health in 80K’s “All the evidence-based advice we found on how to be more successful in any job,” which motivated me to rethink how much time and energy I should invest in that area.
As I mentioned in another comment, I think I have a good idea of the day-to-day of software engineering. Research not so much, and I do hope to get some experience in that direction soon. I’ll also be thinking about your other suggestions about exploring other career paths and adapting the paths I’m on.